Trufaldino: The Evil King of Baghdad
The full text of Boiardo's newly translated Orlando Innamorato will be published by Parlor Press in August 2003 in a new translation with an introduction and notes by Charles Stanley Ross, the book will appear in print and ebook versions. If you would like to be notified of its availablity, please let us know. Email editor@parlorpress.com or sign our guestbook.
Trufaldino: The Evil King of Baghdad
A hypertext episode from Orlando Innamorato by
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Newly Translated with an Introduction and
Notes by Charles Ross
Introduction
Five hundred years ago, in 1482, the Italian poet Matteo Maria Boiardo told a story about a king of Baghdad
in his romantic epic titled Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love). Boiardo told his story
for an audience in Ferrara, a city not far from Venice, which had extensive
trading networks throughout the East. He therefore set his story of horror
in what is today
Boiardo first mentions the traitorous king, named Trufaldino (from the verb truffare, to trick), in a catalog of generals who join in an invasion of Albraca, the modern Samarkand, in Turkestan. The Innamorato is a very long romantic epic and the story of Trufaldino is woven in among many battles and other story lines. In the portion extracted here, Boiardo gives a quick example of Trufaldino’s deceit on the battlefield. Later he pauses in the poem to tell a story that demonstrates Trufaldino’s horrors. The story is literally that, something written in a book found by the knight Ranaldo, a book chained, in medieval fashion, to a stone beside a dead woman hanging in the doorway to a cavern. What Ranaldo reads turns out to be true, because Trufaldino emerges as a character in the main story of the battle of Albraca. Eventually Ranaldo captures the king of Baghdad, ties him to his horse’s tail, and drags him till he dies.
It is not clear how we should interpret Boiardo’s fictional portrayal of this evil king. In his one of his forays into literary interpretation, Sigmund Freud defined the uncanny (unheimlich) as a feeling, not an aesthetic, that may occur in literature or in life. The elements of the uncanny are, first, a feeling of strangeness whose intensity depends on something’s having happened before. Besides this element of recurrence, the uncanny arises when our emotion overtakes our reason despite ourselves, as when, although not superstitious, we can’t help but wonder at some coincidence or seeming prediction of an event. A final element is Freud’s belief that the source of the uncanny is some childhood trauma and or anxiety that emerges in later life after the mechanisms of repression are relaxed. In a work of 35,000 lines, it is uncanny in itself that only in the story of Trufalindo does Boiardo make any mention of childhood, perhaps because in chivalric romances, one commentator has suggested, every knight behaves like child anyway. For whatever reason, Boiardo traces Trufaldino’s evil behavior to his childhood. Freud was not the first to turn from superstition to psychology to explain personalities.
Besides isolating key elements of the uncanny, Freud distinguished its occurrence in real life, where it is fairly frequent, from its expression in literature, where its effects are often reduced because the literary work asks us to suspend disbelief, to accept a world where ghosts appear from the grave, magic controls natural phenomena, or coincidences occur.
Boiardo’s account of the evil king of Baghdad is not particularly weird in itself. What is more uncanny, I think, is that in a story written half a millenium ago, Boiardo singled out the king of Baghdad among all eastern potentates for special opprobrium. There are two explanations. Boiardo’s portrait may just be another example of orientalism, which may be defined as the western reaction to a powerful foreign threat where a writer substitutes contempt and misunderstanding for fear. Yet other knights from Babylon, the region around Baghdad, are notably courteous and admirable even if, in the case of the lover Polindo, more than a little foolish. Boiardo regularly creates admirable characters from non-Christian countries, nor is he afraid to show, as in the case of the House of Maganza, those who are traitors at home. Baghdad’s bad reputation is not easily explained except as an example of the uncanny. That is, despite our reason, our efforts to explain away the coincidence, we cannot help feeling that there is something about that eastern city that produces bad men, whether because the politics forces leaders to adopt a certain set of cruel policies, the culture itself is prone to violence, or maybe it’s the water they drink or the food they eat. It seems strange that of all the middle eastern kingdoms Boiardo mentions—and he introduces the kings of Turkey and Syria as well as other realms such as Circassia and Media that are not political entitites today—it is only Baghdad that produces such a monster. Our reason tells us that it cannot be the water or the food, but our feeling that there is something truthful about the recurrence of despotism in a single geographical area overpower our attempts to be logical. Trufaldino’s behavior will seem inexplicable to many, and our emotional response is a good example of what Freud tried to describe, using examples from Greek myth and German literature. He overlooked, as so many modern readers do, our close ties to the Italian Renaissance.
— Charles Ross
Purdue University
Title Page | Introduction | 
Start | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | End
Matteo
Maria Boiardo,
Trans. Charles Ross
© 2003 by Parlor Press
